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Archives for the tag “ Epistemology ”

It was widely known or supposed in the 19th century that Finno-Ugrians were Mongolians. Christoph Meiners (1747-1810) had classified humanity as beautiful or ugly peoples (“ schöne ”, “ hässliche ”). White people were beautiful, dark people were ugly. Of old, non-Europeans had been regarded as unattractive. Their character had also been considered with the ugliness of the body. According to Meiners they — the Mongol race for instance — were greedy, shameless, irritable and suffering from lack of compassion, while Caucasians were courageous and moderate. Both Blumenbach and Meiners thought that the climate had determined the quality of body and character but the ideal racial types of their age were in any case ready formulated. Mongols were in general considered in the first place as practical and less adapted for intellectual activities.

In the middle of the 19th century some men of letters and many anthropologists began to represent the viewpoint that the so-called Aryan race was the most highly advanced race of mankind. This race was thought to include the Caucasian race, or most Europeans. The concept of Aryan expanded when the criterion became the Indo-European linguistic family, which began to be called “ Aryan ” in memory of the tribes who about 4000 years ago conquered the northern part of present-day India. In this classification the position of Semites was obscure. Sometimes they were counted among Caucasians and could be regarded as Aryans.

In some early groupings of mankind Finns had been of Caucasian origin, but in general Indo-Europeans and Finno-Ugrians were divided in different racial classes. They belonged to different language families, and Finno-Ugrian languages were still more often associated with Turkish and Mongolian or with the assumed Ural-Altaic language family.

The concept of Aryan included both a language group and a race. Speakers of Aryan (Indo-European) languages were considered to form a race. Before long the Aryan theory came to mean race discrimination. […]

When I first discovered that scholars were trying to figure out a proper name for this emerging field of research, my first reaction was : “ Wow, if a consensus still has to be achieved in English, how long will it take to reach one in French ? ”

After surfing around on the internet for interesting links on the Digital Humanities, I found out that our colleagues from France simply decided to go along with “ Digital Humanities ” even in French 1. Although I also found myself using it frequently in Quebec (Canada) in my casual conversations, I was still striving for a better translation.

That’s when I decided to adopt technohumanités as the French translation for Digital Humanities, coined after the term technopédagogie which is broadly used for IT in education.

I would especially love to hear from the French community on this issue. Am I the only one using a neologism or did I simply stumble across the proper translation by accident as it naturally made sense ? Should I, by any chance, have coined a proper translation that makes sense to the community, I believe that the Day of Digital Humanities could be a great place to start a new consensus.

Obviously, if I missed a key French article or author on this topic that already acts as a figure of authority, I would appreciate if you would kindly send me the reference.